Welcome to Hat to Money. I'm Joel and I am Mad and today we're talking cheap meal prep for struggling chefs with Frankie Celenza.
Yeah, there is nothing more elemental than our need to eat food. Right, So, no matter how much money you've got in the bank, no matter how much debt you have, we're all united by the fact that we get hungry. And while some folks might like to splurge when it comes to their meals, the rest of us are looking for ways to cut those costs so that we can reach some other financial goals. And that is why we were pumped to be joined by Daytime Emmy Award winning
culinary host Frankie Celenza. Frankie's show Struggled Meals. It is all about getting the most bang for your buck in the kitchen, both for your wallet and when it comes to the amount of time that you're spending cooking that's important as well. So we're excited to talk about that today. Frankie, thank you for joining us today on the podcast.
So happy to be here you guys.
Frankie, We're glad to have you man, and I feel like you even make cooking accessible to someone like me. Who is terrible at the stuff. So I appreciate that. But our first question to everyone who comes on the show, we want to know what your craft be. Your equivalent is Matt and I. We splurge outrageously on good beer while we're saving for the future. What is what is that in your life?
Yeah, it's it's mountain bike parts. Yeah. Actually, just before yeah, I got a package with a new set of long fingered gloves. Very important. My current pair is wearing through on the index finger from heavy breaking and intense rock riding. So it's time for another pair, you know, gotta gotta protect the contact points.
It's incredibly important that in your feet. So how did you get into biking? Was it just a love for you said? You said mountain biking specifically, and it sounds like you are actually on trails. Was it a love of being an outdoors like on the mountain or did you start like most of us, riding around your cul de sac? How did you get into biking?
This is so bizarre, but when I was thirteen years old, my very best friend got into road biking because it was the Lance Armstrong era, and so I hopped to my dad's bike and started riding with him, and before you know it, I mean we were competing in the national championships as road bike riders and I've probably done nine hundred laps of Central Park and stage races and that was my sport as a teenager, Like I actually thought about maybe going pro. I was a very good sprinter.
This is before the days of texting, even T nine, nobody was even T nine texting. Now when I get on the road, the cars seem to be going faster, bigger, and with less focus. So I love being in the woods. I love being with nature, and it's a natural antidepressant. It makes me feel really good.
I love it. It's good for you from so many different angles. I mean from a transportation standpoint, from a just staying healthy standpoint, and obviously, like you're saying, from a mental clarity standpoint as well.
And I know it costs money, but from the value you get from biking regularly, it's like it's so worth the money you stick into it, for sure, So.
It really is. We have firm your splurge.
Oh sweet, Yeah, well, I will say this my first mountain bike, I literally just changed it six months ago and I had been riding that since two thousand and one, So I got my money's worth out of that. Man, the technology has changed quite a bit. The stuff I can get up and down now is like I couldn't believe it. I thought lightness was all that matters. It is not the case.
Yeah, that's I mean my splurge. We totally do.
Man. We sign off.
So well, let's talk about your area of expertise, which is which is cooking, which is helping us helping everyone out there cook and make awesome meals for less. I'm curious too, what was the inspiration for struggle Meals We love your philosophy? Was this born out of necessity? Were you like some broke college student sort of thing and you're like, I got to figure out how to do this on my own? Or yeah, what kind of necessitated or brought about this creative endeavor.
It's sort of twofold because when I look back when I started making these videos in two thousand and nine, I actually have a reel that I made where I'm holding up packets and I'm like, I'm like, get the packets from the dining hall, use them right here. You know it's going to be perfect. But what I did in school was I undercut the meal plan by a dollar and I had people come over to my place for what was definitely a better meal than what was
being served in the cafeteria. Coming full circle, I mean literally, we were just filming random recipes that taste made. Someone from the office came onto the set and said, hashtag struggle meals is trending. We think we should make a show around that. And it just started like that, wow, and I was like, Okay, let's revisit this. I figured it would be people in school or just out of school, or people with their first job, and it is a
much wider swap of people than that. I mean, I mean, after like housing and transportation, I feel like food is number three or four biggest expense for sure.
That really is yeah, months to month. Yeah, you discovered that there's a lot of folks who are cooked like they're just out of college, even old.
Yeah, they anything beyond that, beyond like some of the wealthiest.
People in the world. I mean, I can't believe they just grab whitebread and slap some stuff on it, and you know, we can do better than that. So the struggle is broad, it can be multifaceted. It doesn't have to just be financial. Yeah.
I guess a common misconception in the world of food at least is that you can't eat healthy on a budget, that you can't do it cheaply, that the cheap foods are the worst foods for you. But when I watch your content, that's not the experience I get, And it's not the experience I have at the grocery store.
Yeah.
Like, sure, some of the nicest whole foods you can spend a whole lot of money on, But I feel like you you don't have to eat like crap if you want to save money.
Do you agree?
I one hundred percent agree. That is my job to agree with that. And it is misleading when you look at the title the show struggle meals, because it sounds like I'm going to be, you know, cutting up a hot dog and you know, cooking it on a George forumangrill and slapping it on white bread, And that's not what we do. And you're right, the unhealthy foods are the cheapest ones. But do you know the biggest cost in food for Americans, the.
Biggest cost in meat.
If you look at your bill at the end of the year, where did the largest amount of your money that you spent on food go. Where did it go?
I'm guessing prepackaged foods like cereal, chips, Swiss misrolls, all that kind of stuff.
It's actually that money went directly into the garbage because thirty percent of the graceries go directly into the garbage waste. So so now imagine that we decide that we're going to put effort into cooking, and we're going to plan a little bit, and we're going to just maybe just work on five dishes, and we know we're going to fail at the beginning, but we get to an efficiency point where we have no waste. Now our budget kind of got bigger because we're not throwing out so much money.
Now you can buy real food.
Yeah, absolutely, So when you are buying real food, I'm thinking about the trend that we've seen in particular over the past few years with higher inflation, like that's also hit the grocery stores as well in a pretty serious way. Right, And so, have you changed your approach or have you changed your advice when it comes to spending less on food? I guess basically, at the end of the day, I want to know if you're still buying eggs because we
saw the eggs bike. It's starting to level off now, But yeah, what are your thoughts on inflation and how that's impacting how folks shop and prepare their food.
I think I've purchased a dozen eggs this year, so I was pretty low on it. I was like, it's not really worth it. And I'm not a huge breakfast guy anyway, so I don't mind just having overnight's oats or you know, sprinkling a little bit of This is going to sound so bougie, but it's a great breakfast. A little bit of chia with some oat milk and tiny bit of maple syrup or honey and like a cow, leave that overnight. I love it. But here's like, here's the main thing. We live in such a convenient time,
arguably the most convenient time of all time. And if you walk into the supermarket, and this goes for all things in life, Okay, you can go so deep down every single path of everything we do. I'm sure you could spend a thousand hours learning about toilet flappers. I'm sure you could so like, and maybe that would save you water money, I don't know. But you walk into the supermarket and they have pretty much everything all the time. If you're in a food desert, that's a different story.
But the problem is people buy things that are out of season and they're expensive. And so if you're not really paying attention to the fact that the prices are fluctuating over the course of the year based on supply and demand and whether it's in season and the climate that you're actually purchasing it in, then you could you know, you could look at asparagus in December and say, sparagus is too expensive. I'm never buying asparagus because it's too
It's like, yeah, it's coming from Argentina. It's not asparagus season now, yeah, and you're paying for shipping. There's a lack of supply, so the price goes up. And right now, I just bought a bunch of asparagus an hour ago. They're super skinny because they're just they're just coming out of the ground, you know, and they came from nearby, and the price was not high. It was two ninety nine for a pound and a half. Because they're in season.
So there's gonna be a flood. They're gonna flood the market with asparagus right now, price is gonna drop, so you know, go on the internet, see what things are in season where you live, and try to eat seasonally. That helps a lot with the money too.
So revolving our meals kind of around what's currently cheap, not just not being agnostic when you're making your grocery list and kind of knowing what's going on seasonally. That's really important to saving money. Right, So, I guess we're talking about winter vegetables in winter and like berries in
April and may, that kind of thing. When those are kind of like because you can get strawberry sometimes like a buck fifty a pound right about now, but in a few months they're going to be way more expensive.
Yep. And unless they start like hydroponically growing it nearby, and then the seasons don't matter as much and the surprise is constant and they've figured it out. But all these tips take probably five hundred days of you having your eyes peeled, you know, and just monitoring all these prices.
Are you buying in bulk when that stuff happens and freezing some of it or something like for instance, no berries, no, no, none of that kind of stuff.
If I'm gonna have berries, I'll just buy frozen berries. I'm not gonna buy freshens and freeze them. They pick them at the season. They have blast freezers, which are really great because they are so cold that when you put the berry into the blast freezer, it freezes so quickly. As you know, water, when it becomes as solid as one of the few elements that expands. So if you freeze something slowly, the water inside the berries expand and it breaks apart all the I guess meat, if you
could call it that. When you defrost it, it always it's just the texture's gone. It doesn't have the snap. So that's if you do it in a home freezer. Is it a little bit better when you buy it from an industrial process? Yeah?
Absolutely, Yeah, I guess I've never thought about the Yeah, the difference between the frozen veggies you buy at the store versus what you can freeze yourself.
Well, they're probably doing that process when berries are at peak season, right, They're using a lot of resect.
They're picking them when there's a ton of supply. They're putting it in their industrial strength blast freezer so that it doesn't you know, crystallize and expand and break apart all the fibers inside and then they're selling them to you. So yeah, if something's out of season, like peas, the frozen aisle is definitely the way to go. Like, I'd pick frozen fees over over canned peas any day.
Okay.
The biggest thing that stands out to me, Frankie, just watching your show is that you are incredibly creative when it comes to how it is that you approach your food, and it makes me think that most of us aren't thinking outside of the box. I think most folks just may not be getting creative enough, and that we're maybe two either specifically meal focused or were too gadget focused when it comes to how folks cook today. What are your thoughts there? Do you do you agree with that that statement?
I guess I totally.
What's your recommendation?
Yeah, it's I actually think we're in a nice era right now with the social media because you can visually watch a recipe in thirty seconds. Some of them are getting a little bit too elaborate because they're clearly chasing views and I'm not learning anything and there's too many ingredients and I can't mimic it. But I just did one yesterday. It has like three ingredients. I don't know how I'm going to make it longer than thirty seconds.
There's so little happening on in it. It's a great it's a great meal, but if you've never been in the kitchen, it's like anything else in life, like it. The first thing you make is probably not going to be great. You do need to learn. I would I would do the kiss rule, keep it simple, silly, and the gadget you don't need. The gadgets you don't need. You really don't need much to get started. As the truth, you just like buy and season plan on using everything. Suck it up. Yeah.
Yeah.
When Matt talks about getting creative, like you used an eye to make a panini, are those like you don't need a panini press?
Right?
No, we think we need all these things to make a decent meal, but really we just need a little ingenuity, right, We.
Need a little ingenuity. And obviously, if you're making a lot of sandwiches, using in an iron is a silly thing. But when we do stuff if like that on the show, you know we're I think I'm talking to two audiences. One is the people that haven't ever been in the kitchen, and I want them to see that, like you can use items from around the home and cook. And the
other group are people that cook all the time. So the people that cook all the time, if they're going to make that recipe, they'll use their panini press, or they'll heat up two cast iron pans, one smaller than the other, put the sandwich in the bigger one, put the smaller one on top, which is now hot because you had it on the stove and you just made a panini press. I mean, cast iron is a giant heat battery and it'll hold that heat and it'll crisp
it up real good. Absolutely, But more than anything, I want people to feel like they can take liberty. You know, when I think back to my mom and my aunt when I was a kid or whatever, every time they would cook out of a cookbook, they would always be like, oh, I changed this, I changed that, I changed that. Like you didn't even make the recipe the right way once,
they're already changing it. And that's the right attitude to have if you've cooked enough enough meals in your life, because a recipe is simply a destination and as you know, I'm sure you've used GPS. There's a lot of ways to get there.
Yeah, no, I like that, Yeah, there can It's gonna have the inspiration perhaps something to set.
Your sites on.
But how do we want to inspire people to improvise? Absolutely?
Yeah, a little. I love it.
Well, Frankie. We're going to get to several other topics, including how it is that you can affordably incorporate meat into your your meals as well as meal prep. That's another a hot tactic that folks can include. We'll get to those plus more right after this.
Our we're back.
We're still talking with Frankie Celenzo about making meals for less money and making good meals right, not having to suck it up and eat like crap, and and the fact that it's it's not necessarily as expensive as as you think.
You don't have to be over there slicing up your bolooney.
Is BLOONI man, I don't. I don't know if I've ever had boloni, to be honest, but you do like hot dogs.
We've talked about this on the show before.
Let's go hot dog.
Sometimes that doesn't make ye, Frankie.
That is that's why we call it Boloonia. If you look at the way Bolooni is spelt, it's spelt Bologna, the town which is where Mortodella comes from in Italy.
And so it is Moretadella, like an improved version.
Mortadella is the original one, and just like parmi gihan odgiano, it has like Italian protections of the European Union, so we weren't allowed to call it that if we manufactured it over here, which is why we have parmesan and boloney when it's American. Isn't that interesting?
It's like we need to go straight to the source and get the real story.
It's very good and I don't mind. Listen. One of my favorite things is a Oscar Mayer boloney sandwich with mayo and white bread and a little bit of dress. It's delicious.
So every once in a hot dog by the way, oh okay, all right, And even Frankie slums it every once in a while, right, even though he's making good stuff.
Most of the times are great.
It's not slumming. It's a fun little treat. Well.
I take my little man and we go to Costco occasionally and we do we do the hot dog thing together and it's a nice little like father son date. So we have a good time. But my my, my girls are not into the hot dog nearly nearly as much as as the guys are. I get Okay, So while we're talking about meat, let's let's keep talking about meat.
These are we're talking about the barkain basement cuts here in terms of hot dogs and in blooney, But meat is you talk about this, and it's just kind of common understanding this point that meat just costs more than a lot of the other things. If you're eating ribbi, you're gonna bust your budget pretty quickly. So like, how how should we be thinking about trimming our meat consumption and being able to maybe still eat meat sometimes but without like breaking the bank.
Yeah, you gotta just eat less meat, is the truth of it. And you know, if you look at history, meat was always like the food of the nobility and all the off cuts off the off cuts, sorry, like the the ofal and the things that were really fatty and tough what went down to the working class people. Those are the cuts that have more flavor, which is ironic now, but the whole world is so efficient at making food that now, all classes of people seem to be eating meat a lot more than the human body.
It's able to process. And I'm not going to get into like diet and all that stuff, but I mean, I think we're all eating way too much of it. I will tell you this. I have some guanchali frozen in my freezer. It's fancy Italian bacon. It comes from the cheek. I bought it two months ago. I keep it frozen. I literally I just sliced a couple thin slices, probably one ounce of it, put it in a pan over medium heat. It shriveled up, rendered out fat, and then I saw teate a bunch of spring onions, which
are in season right now in that fat. And I just put spaghetti in there, and like that was delicious. And I'm eating meat, but I'm using it as a flavoring and as the fat for the dish rather than using olive oil. And then the center point is perfectly aldente spaghetti, which I think is textually pleasing.
Yes, yeah, that's my My wife calls using meat as a garnish just like you said, like the ability to kind of pull some of that flavor of.
So like you know, instead of getting four chicken breasts that have been deboned and de skinned. That's always going to cost more money because it's just on a fundamental level, like there was a lot of process there that you're paying for someone else to do. So if you eat chicken, I think it's pretty fundamental that you buy a whole chicken and learn to break it down. It's really not
that hard. And by the way, you get a carcass at the end, which means you can make your own stock, which is superior to everything else.
Heck, yeah, okay, So wrothwise, two questions. Do you boil your carcass? Do you boil your bones in an instapot?
I don't I have one. I've not used it.
I just but you don't use it. So that goes back to the gotcha. It goes back to how unnecessary certain tools are. All right, So I was curious about that. But then secondly, so for folks who are say who are maybe they're working out more, they're looking to get more protein in their diet. I noticed in a couple of year recipes that you incorporate some peanut butter like into sauces or to kind of thicken things up and it seems like that's an awesome way to include like
ten twenty grams of additional protein in something. What are some of the other way or first of all, I guess how often do you do that? Because I thought that was interesting from a maybe from a flavor standpoint. But then what are some other sources of affordable protein other than meat?
I love? And we can get back to meat, because I didn't want to just brush it off. I know people like to eat it. It is the most fun thing to cook. It's obviously a wonderful centerpiece, even an affordable meal, So we can get back to that. But I love peanut butter. I mean I put it, put a scoop of peanut butter with oatmeal. I put a scooped peanut butter with with cereal. I like a banana
peanut butter smoothie. I'll do it all the time. But I cooked four I did three tennis tournaments with the world number one tennis player who's a famous vegan, and we did a lot of beans for protein and nuts. But nuts. There's some crazy stuff that he was having me do, for example, like cashewes. Let's just say a cashew has ten calories Okay, if you and I eat the cashew, we're gonna spend five six calories just trying to break it down because it's so hard to digest.
But what I was doing was soaking the cashews in water overnight and then putting them in a super low oven just to dehydrate that water out but not create a miard reaction. And now you look at the cashew, it's got no color on it. It looks the same as the other cashoe, but when you bite into it, it's much softer. So I've started the digestion process outside the body, and now it only takes let's say two calories to consume the ten, so you get a net gain of eight versus if you just eat it raw.
Maybe you know fifty percent of the energy that you're getting is being used to digest the thing.
Feel like a mama bird.
Yeah, oh, exactly right. The mom bird choose it and then regurgitates it into it. It's baby chick's mouth, that's correct. Lentils are a great source of protein, and as far as like energy goes, which is super interesting. Fat, the good fats are really really great. Every gram of fat has twice as many calories as that of protein or carbohydrate, so you can eat half as much of it by weight and still be able to store energy. Because it isn't just about repairing muscle, it's also preparing for the
next time you're gonna. I mean, we all use our muscles every day, and we use the energy that we eat to move right. I think coconut milk is a great, great thing to use occasionally. I love olive oil. What else can we talk about? Cannellini means are wonderful?
All right?
Well, okay, let's say somebody says, you know what, I appreciate Frankie, all your advice on other ways to include tein of my diet. Maybe I'll do the cashew trick, but I also want I also want meat as kind of the main thing I like. Yeh, I don't know, three or four dinners a week, And so I guess is it all about It's all about the cuts, right, is it? The cuts that make the difference, and how you talked about the cheaper cuts oftentimes can be the
most flavorful. But I guess some people are just so used to buying boneless, skinless chicken, breast or whatever that they forget to get the chicken thighs that are like a third of the price but way tastier.
Well, listen, this is a money podcast. So every as you know, everybody's trying to make a buck. And the way it happens in food is through convenience. Right at the highest level, you can go out to eat, they'll take care of the dishes for you, they'll cook all the food for you. Great, that's the most expensive. Then you get the fast casual. They do less things for you. It's a little bit less money. Then you want to
you know, you got prepared foods at the supermarket. That's even less expensive because you've got to reheat it or do some processes to get it ready to be consumed. And then you go one level below that and we're to the boneless, skinless chicken breast and the pre formed hamburger patties and the chicken wings that they have already marinating in various things for you. I mean, it's cheaper compared to the restaurant and the fast casual, but you're
still paying for convenience. So you can go a level lower than that. And really what you want to do is like if you just think of the animal as a whole. That's the cheapest way to get it, because no one has cut anything off of it yet. So we did an episode many seasons ago where we took a giant pork loin and we got like twenty meals out of it, and you had the leaner end and the fattier end of it, and we were cutting the chops at different thicknesses depending on how much protein had
had or protein and fat had had. And I was giving you four different ways to cook all those things. And you know that's really the way to do it. I'm going on a little bit of tangent here, but.
No, that's you're funny to.
Put more effort. It's not magic, there's no way. It's not through buying a tool. It's not through buying a one, you know, an onion cutter thing where it's got that grid and you put the onion and slams it through. It's not through a crock pod or any of those things, or an air fryer. It's through you physically doing more labor because that because then you're not giving money to someone else who has been doing it for you before, which brings us back to convenience.
Yeah, yeah, So I mean, essentially what you're talking about, and you mentioned that that porkloin, I'll watch that video. You you got multiple meals out of it, and what you're essentially doing there is you're prepping meals for the week ahead. Why, I mean, what are some of the other advantages that come with thinking ahead and the ability to basically prep your meals in advance If.
You can, If you can prep in advance and you can stick to that schedule even if you don't feel like eating that thing, then you will reduce the waste. And that's the thirty percent of the money you're spending on food not going down the toilet. So that's really really fantastic. But listen, it happens to me too. You know, I'll cook a bunch of things and then I either get sidetracked because life happens. I totally understand it, and then all of a sudden, there's nothing to eat, and
when the blood sugar starts falling. That that's when you either make, you know, a fast food decision or you're just like, oh, let's just go out to dinner, and then you know it's one hundred dollars and it's so when you're meal prepping, you're you're planning, and when you're planning, you're also financially planning. I would say, you got to stick to the schedule, and you've got to be obedient, not obedient.
Discipline, obedient to your so your previous self, to your own roles. Y.
Yeah, absolutely, no, I think that's so true. I mean, I think when you have a budget, you have a plan for your money, and so it makes it way more likely that you're actually going to follow through. And the same is true when you have a meal plan. Like you know, my wife and I we sit down on the weekend, and I will say she takes the main role in kind of meals, which is awesome, and
I'm kind of more the clean up guy. But it's it's that plan that we make ahead of time and then which is so helpful in ensuring that we're actually going to fow through and not just randomly go out
to eat. But I guess, so planning is important, but talk to us about actually making the meals ahead of time, because you're doing that too, right, So you're like creating a bunch of stuff and sticking it in the freezer or fridge so that you've got meals to eat for days or potentially even like weeks or something that you can pull out a month from now. Like how important is that you know?
There is no one size fits all, And so we've done that on the show. We have an episode this season for that, we had an episode last season for that, and I know we've touched on it before. But again, I'm just trying to get people to think about many, many things, and we did smart things, like, you know, it could be really easy. Let's say you prepped food for work, you know, and then you forget to bring it.
That's no good. So we were like, you got to put your car keys or your metro card or whatever. You got to put that in the fridge with the food that you prepped, so when you're looking for it, you don't forget the food. That was one thing I would say, if you have the time to do it, absolutely,
But there's so many ways to prep food. And you know, we think of making a whole meal on Sunday night and freezing it and that's really great, but you could also if a recipe calls for half an onion or something, you could chop up the whole onion and then put it in a little deli container. And now you've got
an onion. You know, you've done some prep for a future meal, and you've cut down on a knife that needs to be cleaned, and a cutting board that needs to be wiped, and eyes that need to be blotted from crying every single time I cut an onion. But food prep comes in many forms, and back to the like, you know, you buy that big piece of meat, that giant piece of meat, and you cut thinner ones on the lean side and pound them out. You can freeze those.
You could even flour them, egg them, par cook them and freeze them and then you know, reheat them if you wanted to. You could go lots of ways. But if you were going to have a meal that had some I don't know, some pork in it or something, you know, think a step ahead. You could go buy just the pork for that meal, or you could buy more of it. And now you're doing prep once for potentially three meals. It's only going to take twenty percent longer, But when you divide that by the three meals you're
gonna get, it's actually a lot more efficient. So I saw my mom doing a task on Easter and she was doing one thing and then switching to the other thing, and then doing one thing and switching to the other thing, And I was like, Mom, it's a lot faster if you just do all of job one first and then switch to job two, because you know you're eliminating steps. You're picking up the knife, putting down the knife, picking up the knife. No, pick up the knife, hold the knife.
Chop chop, chop, chop chop. Put down the knife for good, and now move on to the next step. I know I'm speaking very esoteric and broadly, but I think people understand what I'm getting at here. You know, be a machine when you're prepping and just do that repetitive, boring task. You'll get faster and faster at it as the repetition is in there. And then even think a meal ahead.
It seems like it's a kind of a holistic approach to how it is that you're thinking about all of the meals that you're going to be consuming that week or even for the next couple weeks, rather than focusing on one bite at a time, or when you can at a time.
You can prep for the next meal, even if you don't know what it is yet, especially if you've got ten dishes that you know cold under your belt. You know, you could say I don't know what I'm going to use this for yet, but then you got to hold yourself to actually using it, because then we get back into the food waste thing.
Okay, So I guess for folks out there who say, maybe there's some folks listening and they're like, man, I've barely got two dishes that I know how to go to without looking up a recipe. Why do you look at me when you said that, Matt just happened to sit across from me. What are maybe some easy meals that someone could prep four lunches. Say they go to work and they're trying to avoid busting their budget by
going out to lunch. What are some meals that are really easy to cook ahead time where they've got something tasty that we know where there's some variety where it's not just PBJ and whitebread with the granaise and baloney. But yeah, like, are there some meals that lend themselves to that meal prep on Sundays?
Yeah?
I think bowls are great to think about to take to work with you, and you know it's easy to say, I'm not inspired. I don't know exactly what to do. But you should be inspired every day by every meal that you eat out. If if you go to you know, a place and buy a quin Wa bowl or whatever you should like, you should be constantly thinking, how did they make this? What are these flavors? Look at that? Oh,
I can do this. So I'm just looking right now, I've got a dish on episode three, season eight, spring green Quinoha. It sounds great. Quenwa's great warm or cold. So it's going to travel really well. It's going to have that interesting texture regardless, it's not going to expire like pasta does. Pasta does not travel well. And spring greens can mean anything. It could be, you know, spring green pesto. It could be sauteed greens. It could be
some some yummy chryciferous spring vegetables. I would do sauce on the side, or if you don't have you know, if you don't want to have twos, you could, for example, put sauce in like the bottom of the container and then everything else on top of it and just make sure you keep gravity that way, and then when you're ready to eat it, flip it over. And now you've just like dressed.
It like that.
Yeah, but you want to think about foods that can travel well, I don't think fried food travels well. I think in general, fried food is probably not so much fun to cook at home because the aroma of the oil, really it's intense, and it's life ruining if you spill that stuff anyway, or if you've got kids running around, I mean, three hundred and fifty degrees ough terrible.
Talk about can foods for a second, because I when I was growing up that was we just say can green beans all the time, and I remember thinking green beans are the worst food on the face of the planet. And then I still remember a standoff I had with my parents over eating like one green bean, and I made their lives miserable over this thing. But then I remember having fresh green beans for the first time in my life, and I was like, I think I like
green beans. Wait a second, Like these are completely different animals. But you kind of just talk smack about canned peas just a little bit again frozen, So I don't know. But then you also, I've seen you make like canned salmon and use that in like a pretty interesting way in your show. So how do we think about canned foods?
Man?
I love canned beans because it's you know, a really fast way to beans can be a really great filler and a lot of dishes. Like we were just talking about taking quenwa to lunch, I mean putting some chickpea's in there from a can, rinsed with a little bit of paprika, olive oil and salt. That's a delicious lunch, you know, And we didn't really have to cook anything except the quinoa, which cooks quickly. But I am really
getting into the science of a lot of greens. And what I've found is that when you cook some greens with acid, they turn kind of brown. If you blanch the greens, ice them, and then put acid after, they hold the beautiful green color. So the canned peas, the canned green beans, they probably have a little bit of acid in there to make them shelf stable, and they probably bring the temperature of the entire can up to
pasteurize it so that it can be shelf stable. And you know, the first thing you notice is you open it up, the color is not amazing. But the frozen, the frozen greens they are Why because they're raw. It didn't have acid and heat applied, which ruined the color, not to mention the texture. Yeah, peas and green beans in a can not texturally plea. I just don't even know what the point is at that point. I gotta be honest.
Yeah, I know, I'd rather do frozen.
And I know my show is Struggle Meals, but like, there's other ways to There's not a lot of nutritional value in there or textural pleasure in anything that is a vegetable in a can. Beans are okay though, and tan fish is fantastic.
Okay, Well, I was going to talk about how much I like cayn spinach because I watch Popeye as a kid, but talk about some of the different I guess I'm more interested in the protein, I guess. So you're talking about cayn fish. What is it that makes canned fish healthy but also tasty?
I think because it's you know, a vegetable is delicate, A piece of muscle is much more resilient to get slapped around. So when you do that same process to you know, fish in a can, it's still good. I love tuna in oil in a can. I think it's great.
All right, Hey, Frankie, we got a couple more questions we want to talk through with you here. Okay, we want to and specifically I'm curious to know about your drawer full of packets that you have and kind of how you infuse those into your recipes. We have just a couple more questions to get to with you. Right after this, we.
Are back from the break talking with Frankie, Sealinza and Frankie. You know, Joel just mentioned your seasoning drawer, but it looks like his completely freey pro bono. Yeah, it looks like you take what's in the bottom of like fast food bags, and you take them home and you dump them out and then you organize them put them in your drawer. You got ketchup mustard, Honey, there is that?
What you do?
Do you just grab a couple extra you know, when you're at a restaurant? How do you have that on hand? And how often do you use the mini packets drawer?
I mean on the show, obviously it's a little bit of a gag because it's so organized and there's such endless quantity in there. But you know, it does have an overarching theme which makes a lot of sense, which is like if you buy things in bulk, or if you happen to have access to a cafeteria, or if you ever get takeout and they give you those things and you don't want it on that meal, you should save it because it could be free flavor in the future. Right now, I've got a lot of duck sauce. I
don't know. I had Chinese takeout and they gave me like six of them. I don't know who they're given six of them to. Is duck sauce super useful in the dishes I want to make. If I think of it as a duck sauce, then the answer is no, it's gonna be super specific. But if I think of it of what it really is, liquid sugar, all of a sudden, the possibilities for those packets open up, and I'm saving it and I'm gonna use it for something nice.
I like it.
Yeah, No, I like the resourcefulness of that. I think you might cross over into cheap territory if you're going to your local fast food restaurant in order to raid their stash of packets. But yeah, if you're just using the extra ones that you get and stuff like that, I think I think that's why.
So I think it's just stealing.
Jill goes to chick fil Ase, like, can I get fifteen chick Flase sauces exactly.
They're like, are you gonna order something with that?
I'm like, I wasn't thinking about it, but I know in season eight of Struggle Meals, you're gonna talk about no cook meals, and especially like we're getting closer to summer, the tempts are warming up. One of the best reasons, in my estimation, to be able to make a meal where you're not cooking and turning on the oven is just because you're making your AC unit work that much harder. You're you're just like heating up your home while the X do your ten is like ninety degrees or something
like that. It seems like a waste.
So working over your yeah, you're sweating, You're staying on their sweating over the open flame.
Yeah, nobody wants that. Nobody wants that.
So yeah, there's somesequent dilemmas as well, Like you know, if you have air conditioning and you're doing a bunch of things that are generating a ton of heat in the kitchen, you're now spending money to counteract that with the entire condition.
Yeah, so it's either hop out side and grill, right, which I think is just wonderful. Right, So you want to talk to tell me a little bit about do you go outside and grill? What's your take on grilling, and then also talk to me a little bit about the no cook meals that people can institute during the summer months.
I think grilling is great. I just moved out of the city. I've spent twenty eight of my thirty six years in New York City and various burrows, and I've just left. I don't actually have a grill yet, but I love it's simplicity. I've always enjoyed it because basically, you take in seasoned vegetables and meats, you season them very sparsely, and you cook them and it's beautiful. And it is the exact same concept of why I love
Italian food. It's just simple. It's just simple. When it's too hot to cook, there's a million things you can eat, and I feel like our bodies are naturally telling us what we should intuitively be eating. One of my favorite things is a gaspacho soup in Spanish cuisine. It's basically red bell pepper is a little bit of tomato and they just like blend it up with olive oil and salt and it's fantastic. And so we have this episode
too Hot to Cook. We didn't do a gaspacho, but we did a chilled cucumber avocado soup and that's great. It you start wondering what is cooking, And so if you think cooking literally means adding heat, I don't think that's a broad enough view of what it means, because sometimes it can just be putting things together in a nice ratio, you know, or turning things into something that's drinkable, or you know, when you make a salad, is that cooking?
You combine an oil in an acid together with an emulsifier and put it over some in seasoned greens and maybe some herbs if you're growing them, which, by the way, I think people should be growing herbs free flavor. You pick it, it grows back, unbelievable. It's a live photosynthesis.
So we should we all have our own little garden going on.
I just found wild chives growing. I've been picking them, I've been using them all week. It's crazy. And here in the Northeast. It's just about ramp season. My wife just went on a walk. She goes the ramps are out. She was out of a lot with our neighbor and she was about to pick them, and the neighbor said, I am not letting you eat anything from the woods. So I guess, But what made like a wild spring onion? Yeah?
Very nice?
Isn't that what made Noma famous? Aren't they He's like literally restaurant from foraging. Yeah, find something ironic and one of the.
Most native meals you can have, and they're getting stuff for free by sending a bunch of interns in the woods to pick them.
Right, we've learned it is not sustainable, a sustainable model. Okay, I guess I got one last question for you, Frankie. And this might be like asking someone to pick their favorite kid, but do you have an absolute favorite? Just go to struggle meal, something that is affordable that kind of fits within the parameters of what you're trying to steer folks towards in order to save money, but that's also just top notch when it comes to flavor and incredibly delicious.
Yeah, it's spaghetti, garlic and oil, sometimes broccoli, sometimes red pepper. You can pull the whole thing together in fifteen minutes. We had a version of it yesterday for lunch. I had some broccoli rob I chopped it up real fine. I put the spaghetti in my salted water, and when it was about seventy percent done, I threw all the chopped broccoli into the water with the spaghetti, dumped the
whole thing through a sieve. Didn't even have a second pan going, saved a little bit of the pasta water, put it all back into the pan with a little bit of the pasta water, and I put some chili oil on it that I made, you know. And that's a variation of sautain garlic and oil with a little bit of red pepper flakes and own spaghetti in it, which is great. You can use frozen broccoli. By the way, broccoli has more protein gram for gram than steak. We were talking about. Yes it does.
I had no idea.
It's nuts, so there's a ton. There's a ton of protein and crciferous vegetables. Yeah. I love spaghetti because it seems so simple. It can be salty, it can be spicy.
It's textraally pleasing when you cook that pasta al dente, and the salt in the water is at two percent salinity, and you twist it around your fork and you bite through it, and you get all these moments of textraal variance as your teeth bite through the perfectly twirled spaghetti cock right through, and then you've you've got this oily vegetable that you put in there. Yeah, it's it's very good.
I can know what I'm eating right now.
Serious broccoli, by the way, I feel like we've just been doing this lightly roasting it in the oven. Broccoli is so much better roasted in the oven, and it brings out so many more flavors in it than it does like cooking on the stove top.
I mean, you're getting the Millard reactions, so even getting some burnt, charred stuff. But you can pretty much take any vegetables and throw it in an oven at four hundred degrees for twenty minutes with oil and salt, and it's gonna be amazing. You know. If it's a harder vegetable, you're gonna cut it into smaller pieces so the distance the center is less, so you know it's not raw in the center. And if it's something really soft. You can leave it pretty big. Yeah, it broccoli in the oven.
And it's so easy, right, you just throw it on a sheet tray.
So easy.
Yeah, so easy, dude, Frankie, we so appreciate you coming on the show Man. Where can our listeners find out more about Struggle Meals and season eight coming up? And I know Season Nate's gonna be great, but you can go back and watch all the old stuff too that Mike, Matt and I have been doing over the past couple of weeks, learning a lot in the process. But where can folks find out more about you and what you're up to?
Well, you can follow me at Frankie Cooks. Frankie I e Cooks, not Frankie Y. And you should definitely go to Taste made dot com because they tell you all the places where you can watch the show, and there are so many that I would say there's a seventy percent chance that if you're listening to this show, you already have access to watch the show in some form, which is remarkable. The distribution has gotten really pretty great, and we've done like four hundred recipes now we just
filmed the one hundredth episode. So the show is doing great. Congrats, Yeah, thank you. It's an endlessly there's so many possibilities for affordable food and it really only needs to be crappy if you want it to be that way. You you can do a lot with very little and it goes for everything in life.
As we've said, Yeah, it just takes a little bit of effort, and you are providing that inspiration. We'll be sure to link to all the different places where folks can find that content. Frankie, thank you so much for talking with us today.
You're very welcome. And if you get into cooking everybody, it will bring yourself satisfaction, which is we'll bring you joy, I promise.
All right, man, what's a fun conversation talking about food here with Frankie. How many times during this conversation were you just visualizing exactly what it was that he was describing. Starts making your mouth a little.
Bit about spaghetti. I almost taste it right now, frank.
Him describing your teeth going through each consecutive noodle, I was like it was like a zoom in, zoomed in shot of like my own mouth, and I can see my teeth like like chomping down on those noodles. I loved it, But do you have a specific big takeaway from this episode?
Okay, so there's, yeah, a lot of good stuff and a lot of informative stuff if you want to make good food at home for less. I think one of the biggest things that stuck out to me, and I think you spot on, is it it takes practice, right, and it takes effort. And so I think we in kind of modern society, we expect everything to be easy. It's actually pretty easy to get what you need at
the grocery store. But if you live in a world of convenience, Yeah, we live in a world convenience, and so we've gotten used to everything coming to us easily. And when it comes to like developing a skill, and that is kind of what you're doing as a an at home chef. You have to develop a skill. One for when it comes to like, let's say you're gonna buy a whole chicken and butcher it right, that's a skill.
But then when it comes to like cooking it properly and making it taste the best that it can in a variety of different ways, that's another skill. And so you don't just acquire those things really willly neely. They don't come to you through osmosis, nor.
Does it happen overnight like he said I think he said specifically, he mentioned five hundred days of being aware of the meals around you and what prices are. Like basically, he's taking you completely through an entire year into the next year. Again, you know where you're repeating ingredients, like you're repeating a season and you're starting to then at that point finally understand oh, this should be in the season. Oh this is how I can use this.
It's a it's a process.
So basically, if you start listening to Frankie and making some changes late twenty twenty four, you're gonna be good at this. Okay, but I think that's that's cool to know that you can be done. You're gonna learn a lot along the way. Then you're gonna have a lot of fun. You might ruin something like but don't let that failure kind of set you back and push you back towards kind of the takeout mentality.
I like it.
Yeah, So my big takeaway is going to be I'm going to try to figure out something like very specific for folks, which is I liked what he was talking about when it came to preparing for a meal. So that kind of sounds daunting, right, because you're thinking, well, how you know it's hard enough preparing for one meal. How am I supposed to think through like five different meals?
But what he was saying was that even just chopping up the whole onion as opposed to half of the onion is considered meal prep And I think where creativity can start to blossom is when we think about breaking down a protein and then pre preparing or prepackaging, say a chicken breast or a chicken thigh, or just a
cut of meat. Because if you say you only need a quarter of a cut of meat or only half of it, if you put the rest of it in the freezer and you've got that set aside, and you know that, Okay, shoot, I got to cook dinner tonight. What can I make at home? You know, maybe you can boil some positive, you got some veggies. Oh, look
in the freezer. I happen to have this protein. And starting to take these different pieces and finding ways creative ways to put them together, Well, in my mind, that's the beginning of creativity is finding ways to place these pieces and have them interact in a way that is appetizing and delicious and hopefully nutritious.
It might have to be like organized to right.
I'm sure I have to get get some organizational skills in order to make sure that you're you're storing things properly. We didn't really talk about that with him, But that has to be part of the equation, right, so that it also doesn't easily find what you need when you need it.
Sure, I don't think it needs to be so overwhelming to where someone is who might be listening things that they have to come up with an entirely new system, right, But just simply putting something in a ziploc bag and writing on it with a sharpie labeling it yep. That way you know exactly what is in there, how many ounces of protein or of meat that is, or maybe
it's a bag of herbs or something like that. But as long as it's labeled, I think that just having that knowledge is a way to create sort of an index of what it is that you have in your kitchen that you know that you can tap for for meals.
I like, so, yeah, a lot of good stuff in here, and yeah, Frankie I love his approach in struct meals. It's such an interesting show that that deviates from so many the other cooking shows you might be used.
To watching a lot. He's a lot of fun.
He's changed the game taking shows, which I in a good way. So all right, Matt, let's get back to the beer that we had on this episode. One of my favorite things to pick up at the grocery store is a six pack of delicious craft beer. Is it because it's delicious or is it because it's pre prepared and all you gotta do is pop that time? But that might be part of it.
It's a little bit of both.
It make it so easy for you. Yeah, well, it's even nicer when the listener sends went our way. This one came from listener Katie, So thank you Katie. She said a few of her favorite wyoming beers, and this one's called fluffy Cow Hazy Ipa. What were your thoughts on this one? Yeah, it was quite tasty.
I'll mention when we when I first poured this thing, I was surprised to see how dark it was. I feel like most of the hazies that that we're drinking, they tend to be lighter, like, aren't they like they in my mind they often look more like orange juice like or even lemonade. Yeah, yeah, sometimes they're they're pretty light. And so this was kind of a it was like a darker amber hazy, but it was quite tasty. Man
definitely had that hot punch going on. But at the same time, it wasn't too vegetable, right, Sometimes those like it It literally feels like you're eating vegetables when you're drinking an iPad. But this one was more balanced. It was you know, hop forward, but certainly still had some of that malt backbone.
I think this one, if I read the label correctly, it had hints of vanilla or something infused into it, which I thought interesting made the mouth feel a little bit softer. So is this like combo of like tropical notes, but like almost made a little more smoother in your mouth because of the presence of vanilla.
So is an interesting combo? Is it Trader?
What's the hop that has more like tropical vanilla?
Like?
Is it Trader Vix? I think it's Vic Secret or something or Vix Secret maybe, I mean, wait, what's Trader Vix? And my thinking of Trader Vix is a lovely coxicil bar. I believe that is what I'm thinking of. It is not that it is what you said. It is a Vic secret, VIC secret. Maybe I don't know, or are you thinking about Victoria's secret?
Maybe I am.
Now, it's like it's some combination of all the words that we just said.
I don't know.
Uh, But Katie, we are incredibly thankful for you. We appreciate you donating this Groooner Brothers brewing beer to the show.
No doubt.
But that's gonna do it for this episode. For links to everything that Frankie is working on, including his socials, you can find those up on our website at howtomoney dot com.
That's right. Yeah, we'll make sure to link to some of the specific episodes that he mentioned. But that's gonna be it for this one, buddy. Until next time, I'm
Best Friends Out, Best Friends Out.